Calling on All Booksellers to Submit to the ABACUS Survey
Printer-friendly version
Booksellers have until Friday, July 12, to submit their responses to ABACUS-18, the American Booksellers Association’s annual financial benchmarking survey. The ABACUS-18 survey is live and available for participation now.
ABACUS is a free, exclusive member benefit for participating bookstores. The customized reports and online tools that reporting stores receive in return for filling out the survey provide a full picture of a bookstore’s financial performance, presented with benchmarking information across a number of categories, including sales volume, profitability, and market size. In addition to the detailed overall and store-specific reports, ABACUS’ online tools allow participating stores to generate additional dynamic reports.
By becoming part of the ABACUS community of participating bookstores, booksellers will receive:
- a full ABACUS benchmarking report (including comparative financial ratios, operations data, and company profile information),
- a customized bookstore performance report, and
- a range of online reporting tools that provide a wide variety of specific analyses, allowing stores to evaluate performance versus similar companies and track their company’s performance over time against the industry results, among other criteria.
This year, ABA will again be working to compile and create the ABACUS report with Industry Insights in Dublin, Ohio, a company that has worked with associations for more than 35 years in preparing studies of business demographics, operations information, and financial ratios. In compiling the data and preparing individual reports, no one from ABA ever sees any store’s individual data, which is only available to select staff at Industry Insights and kept strictly confidential.
ABA member bookstore received instructions to access the survey on May 6 in an e-mail from Michael Becher of Industry Insights, with the subject line “ABACUS-18 Benchmarking Survey.” Booksellers are encouraged to check with their colleagues or in their spam folder if they did not receive the e-mail.
The deadline for submitting to ABACUS-18 is Friday, July 12. Booksellers with any questions about ABACUS are encouraged to contact ABA’s Dan Cullen or Industry Insights’ Michael Becher.